Belarusian intelligence is monitoring movements related to the deployment of armored vehicles and a contingent of US armed forces in Lithuania.
President of the country Alexander Lukashenko announced this today at a meeting with Secretary of the Security Council of Belarus Stanislav Zas, Defense Minister Andrei Ravkov and Head of the Main Intelligence Directorate Pavel Tikhonov, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The transfer is underway. And our intelligence records this. Well done. From the moment of unloading at the Latvian port in Riga to the journey to the place of deployment, we have all the data. Somewhere around half a thousand military personnel, up to 600 people, who are being deployed to our border. Somewhere around 29-30 tanks, armored vehicles with all the accompanying personnel,” Lukashenko is quoted as saying by his official website.
He considers this threat insignificant for the Belarusian army, which is capable of inflicting “unacceptable damage” on the enemy.
“This, of course, is an armored fist, there is no need to downplay its significance. But 30 tanks and 30 armored vehicles are simply ridiculous against the Belarusian army. We, as I often say, carried out four modernizations of our army, and we perfectly understood what kind of fists would be created on our borders and what kind of enemy, God forbid, we could face. We don’t even have to make any movements to resist,” Lukashenko said.
However, according to him, Belarus will be forced to respond to “such demonstrations.” At the same time, the President of Belarus especially emphasized that his country does not need outside help.
“Frankly speaking, we can cope with them even with our mobile air assault units, which perform the corresponding functions. We ourselves have enough strength and means to respond to such things, and not only to similar ones. Therefore, there is no need to call on the whole world to come to the defense of Belarus. We can protect ourselves,” Lukashenko said.
Obviously, he meant military assistance from Russia. That is why Lukashenko repeated his scandalous thesis about “alien wars” from which Belarus suffered (in a recent interview with Kazakh media, he named the Great Patriotic War as an example of such a war).
Then it becomes clear why Lukashenko does not want to involve Russia - he is afraid of the US reaction, although he is showing off.
“You see from the events in Syria. If Americans are with fuel tankers or without armored vehicles, and even without weapons, everyone tries to stay away from them. The US Army, NATO, stationed here in Europe, is truly powerful. But Americans must understand: God forbid, there is some kind of collision, we (military people) will not look at our passports. Who will fight against us - Americans, Lithuanians, Germans or someone else,” Lukashenko said.
He added that Belarus will manage without Russian military-technical assistance.
“We, of course, will not spare money on this. Let's find this money. But we are not Russia, which has hydrocarbons, nor America, which prints dollars. We don’t have that much money, so our main principle in defending the country is unacceptable damage to the enemy. We must proceed from this,” Lukashenko said.
The Pabrade training ground, 15 km from the border with Belarus, was chosen as the location for the unit of the American armored division. In the spring of 2020, NATO is preparing to hold its largest military exercise there in the last 25 years. It is planned to work out issues of transferring troops from US territory to the European continent.